by Tom Harper
‘Gaius Valerius Maximus.’ He spits out the words like a centurion summoning men to be flogged. ‘Your notoriety precedes you.’
‘So does yours.’
‘I repented my sins. Can you say the same?’
‘I sleep easily enough.’
He looks at me then, and though age clouds his eyes they seem to go right through me. ‘Have you come to ask me about the Bishop?’
‘Do you have anything to tell me?’
‘I was there in the library. I assume someone told you. I’m sure Aurelius Symmachus was eager to help.’
‘You know him?’
‘He and I are old friends.’ He crunches down on the last word as if biting a nut. ‘We were in prison together during the persecutions. Did you know that? Only one of us was in chains, mind, not a relationship of equals. He had the whip hand.’
‘Did you see Bishop Alexander at the library?’
He raises his eyebrows, stretching the skin around his eyes so that they widen alarmingly. ‘I struggle to see what’s a foot in front of me.’
I remember his nickname. The Sophist – the man who can twist any argument. ‘Did you encounter him?’
‘No.’
I point to the church. ‘What about Bishop Eusebius?’
‘What about him?’
‘He was there too.’
‘Then I’m sure he avoided me. He doesn’t like to be seen with me. Churchmen don’t – like your little friend here.’ A nod to Simeon, who’s fidgeting as if he has ants crawling up his legs. ‘They worry I’ll drag them to Hell with me.’
Simeon tugs my arm and murmurs that the ritual in the church is ending. I stand and look down on the withered old man.
‘Do you know who killed Bishop Alexander?’
His face is clear and innocent as rain. ‘Only God knows.’
‘Did you kill him?’
Asterius lifts up his arms like a beggar, so that the sleeves of his robe fall back to the elbow. Simeon gasps and turns away. I have fewer qualms; I study them with professional interest.
He has no hands. All that protrude are withered stumps.
‘A half-blind man with no hands probably didn’t smash Alexander’s head in.’
We’re walking across the square, against the crowds streaming out of the church. Simeon’s angry.
‘Why do you always ask these people who killed Alexander? Do you expect them to tell you?’
I slow down, so that Simeon comes level. ‘When I was a young army officer, one of my men was stabbed in a tavern brawl. Three men had been with him. I asked them who was guilty and two gave the same answer. The third named one of the others.’
‘He was lying?’
‘He was telling the truth. The other two had agreed to frame him.’
As Simeon digests my homily, the crowd’s momentum changes. They stop, drawing apart to open a channel in their midst. Simeon and I are pushed back. A golden litter seems to float past in the air – you can barely see the eight Sarmatian slaves sweating under its weight. The purple curtains are embroidered with the imperial monogram, and beside it the peacock emblem of Princess Constantiana, Constantine’s sister.
‘Eusebius attracts quite a congregation,’ I observe.
The litter passes and disappears through the palace gate. The crowd starts to move again. Simeon and I make our way around the side of the church and let ourselves in a small door in an octagonal annexe. Simeon looks anxious: I can’t tell if it’s Eusebius he’s worried about, or my presence in the church. But, in fact, barely anyone notices us. The room’s filled with men undressing themselves and gossiping freely: for a moment, I think we’ve stepped into a bathhouse. This must be where the priests disrobe after the service.
Eusebius is a heavy-set man with drooping cheeks, a thin scraping of hair and fat lips that are a strange purple colour, as if he’s eaten too many berries. He’s standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by attendants who are unwinding a long golden cloth from around his shoulders. I can see he recognises me; I wait and watch, while he tries to place me. We’ve crossed paths before, though I doubt either of us cares to remember it.
‘Gaius Valerius,’ I remind him.
‘Gaius Valerius Maximus,’ he reproves me, as if I’d forgotten my own name. He rolls the Maximus around his mouth like a punchline. ‘You were at Nicaea. Standing in the shadows, listening to what we said with one hand on your sword. We used to call you Brutus. Did you know that? We worried there’d be a knife in our backs if we said something you disliked.’
I didn’t know that.
‘Perhaps we can go somewhere more private to talk.’
A stern look. ‘I have no secrets from my flock.’
Very well. ‘Alexander of Cyrene died yesterday at the Egyptian Library. The Emperor…’ I weight the word, arrogating its power. ‘The Emperor asked me to investigate.’
‘And?’
The reaction shocks me. First, for its utter lack of sympathy; second, for the fact he doesn’t care who sees it. Every man in the room is watching our conversation, like gladiators sparring. And not one of them – Christians all – seems troubled by the death of their bishop.
‘One of the last things Alexander did was ask to see you. Soon afterwards, he was dead. They found a necklace with a Christian monogram near his body.’
I show him the gold necklace Constantine gave me. ‘Do you recognise this?’
Eusebius turns like a plump scarecrow, arms aloft so that his acolyte can remove his robe. ‘No. And I never went to the library yesterday.’
‘Aurelius Symmachus saw you there.’
‘Aurelius Symmachus.’ He says it with a lisp, distorting the name into nonsense. ‘You know his history? In Diocletian’s time he was one of the chief architects of the persecutions. He made so many martyrs that heaven could hardly hold them. He almost killed Alexander thirty years ago. He probably decided to finish the job.’
If I’d wanted to murder Alexander, I could have done it then and been hailed a hero.
‘Symmachus said he saw you at the library,’ I persist. ‘Is he lying?’
Eusebius turns back to face me. With his surplice gone, there’s less to smooth the rolls of fat bulging under his tunic.
‘By the time I got to the library, Alexander was already dead.’
‘Did you see the body?’
‘I arrived and heard he was dead. There was no need for me to stay.’
‘You didn’t want to help?’
‘Christ said: Leave the dead to bury the dead. It’s no secret that Alexander and I had differences. If I’d stayed there crying crocodile tears, who would have believed me?’ And then, in case a quick show of contrition will make me go away, he adds, ‘I preferred to grieve in private.’
He’s telling the truth about one thing. If this is the best simulation of grief he can give, it wouldn’t have fooled anyone.
XIII
London – Present Day
ARCUMTRIUMPHISINSIGNEMDICAVIT. FRIDAY 17H. I can help.
She ran back into the reading room, barely stopping to show the guard her pass. She sat down at the computer and copied the words into a search engine.
Your search – arcumtriumphisinsignemdicavit – did not match any documents
She couldn’t believe it. The whole Internet, and this doesn’t appear once. And yet, in a perverse way, it gave her hope. Whoever sent it, they didn’t want it to be easy to understand. They knew it might be read be someone else.
It looked like Latin. She wrote it out in block capitals on a request form, then accosted the librarian at the Reference Enquiries desk.
‘Do you know what this means?’
The librarian, a tall black woman in an extravagantly patterned dress, pulled on her glasses.
‘“He dedicated the arch as a sign of triumph.”’
‘Do you know where it comes from?’
The glasses came off. ‘At a guess? From a triumphal arch.’
‘Is it possible to find o
ut which one?’
‘You could try the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. It’s a catalogue of all the Latin inscriptions which survive from the Roman Empire. If it is Roman, of course. It could be a Second World War memorial.’ She saw Abby’s blank look and sighed. ‘People still wrote them in Latin.’
She scribbled a shelfmark number below the Latin and pointed Abby across the reading room. It wasn’t hard to find: the Corpus volumes took up most of a shelf, and probably weighed more than a human body. But they were well organised. In five minutes Abby found what she wanted. The full text of the inscription that ended with the line, ‘He dedicated this arch as a sign of his trumph.’ And underneath, the location.
Rome. Arch of Constantine.
Rome, Italy – Present Day
Once, voyagers bound for Rome landed at Ostia, the thriving port at the mouth of the Tiber river. But the harbour had silted up centuries ago, first burying the ancient city and then preserving it for future generations of tourists and archaeologists. Now, visitors landed three miles away on the other side of the river, at Fiumicino Airport. Abby took the train in to Rome and checked in to a small hotel in the Trastavere quarter. She could barely sit still.
It was only mid-afternoon. She had hours to kill before the meeting. She bought herself a guidebook and took a cab to the forum. On her right, across a bare excavation, a huge brick building rose up the hill in expanding concentric curves. Trajan’s Market, the guidebook called it, and when she went inside it was breathtakingly easy to imagine it as a shopping mall. She’d thought that most Roman ruins were either two-dimensional foundations, or hollowed-out shells like the Colosseum. But this seemed to be perfectly preserved: an open atrium overlooked by three full stories of galleries above. She was disappointed to learn that they’d probably housed government offices, rather than shops.
She wandered through galleries of sculpture and fragments recovered from the ruins of the Roman forum until she found the hall she wanted. Funerary Architecture. The exhibits were displayed in mock-stone cabinets that had been erected around the room to mimic tombs. You had to stoop to see inside.
Fragment of a grave plaque, 4th century AD said the placard. Her breath came faster as she read the inscription printed underneath. UT VIVENTES ADTIGATIS MORTUOS NAVIGATE. To reach the living, navigate the dead. She took Gruber’s piece of paper out of her pocket and compared it. Exactly the same.
But the tomb was empty – nothing but a blank, black wall. A forlorn card taped to the backing offered a meek apology in three languages: This item is temporarily unavailable.
A young security guard sat on a stool in the corner. Abby went over and forced a smile. ‘Do you speak English?’
A nod, and a warm smile in return.
‘Do you know what happened to this piece?’
A solemn look came over him. ‘It has been stolen. One night two months ago, a gang broke in and took it.’
Something tightened inside her. ‘That’s terrible.’ She looked around the room. Red lights blinked at her from the dark corners. ‘Aren’t there alarms?’
‘They were professional. The hill behind here is very steep – it is simple to come on the roof. They climbed through a ventilation shaft, cut the alarm and – ciao.’
‘Did they take much?’
‘Only this one thing. We think they must be working for a collector who knows exactamente what he likes.’ He shook his head. ‘Is strange. The museum was open for them, and we have many more valuable things. Why they do not take them?’
‘Did the police trace anything?’
‘Nothing.’
His radio crackled, summoning him. He stood. ‘Enjoy your visit, signorina.’
She still had time to kill. There was a modern road which Mussolini had bulldozed through the ancient heart of Rome, but she took the old route, the Via Sacra through the forum. She wandered among the broken temples and shattered columns, trying to imagine it filled with life. Past the Senate, where Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar; past the church of San Lorenzo, a baroque church caged within the columns that had once been the pagan temple of Antoninus and Fausta.
Clouds began to mass over the gaudy heights of the Victor Emmanuel monument. The vast hollow arches of the Basilica of Maxentius loomed on her left, a scale of architecture not seen again until nineteenth-century railway stations. And ahead, the biggest relic of all: the breached caldera of the Colosseum. Even this late in the season, tourists were still queueing to get in, as they had almost two thousand years ago. Abby ignored them, and wandered across the surrounding square to a dirty white arch standing like an afterthought in a corner of the great plaza. Behind her, traffic roared around the ancient arena. She looked at her watch: 4.58.
The Arch of Constantine. Built to commemorate Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, which made him undisputed master of the Western Roman Empire, the guidebook said.
Constantine the Great. She knew the name, but not much more than what Gruber had told her. Roman emperor, converted the empire to Christianity, and thereby Europe and afterwards wherever Europe’s tentacles spread. The guidebook gave a thumbnail sketch that didn’t add much, except the trivia that he’d been born in modern-day Serbia, and his mother had been a brothel-keeper’s daughter.
But there had to be more. Ever since she’d woken in hospital, Constantine had been a strange, flickering companion, greeting her at every turn, then melting into shadow. The gold necklace with his monogram. The fourth-century manuscript left in the shadow of Constantine’s palace at Trier. The text message quoting the inscription. Is it a coincidence? A joke? Am I going mad? She felt as if she were trapped in a dream, running through a labyrinth where every turn brought her up against the same wall.
She looked up at the arch. Stern men, bearded and cloaked, gazed down on her as if trying to tell her something.
And what does it have to do with Michael?
She heard footsteps behind her and turned. A guide was leading a group of tourists across from the Colosseum, a severe-faced woman holding up a furled umbrella like a military standard. Abby scanned the faces and wondered what she was looking for. No one noticed her – they were too busy staring at the arch on the screens of their cameras, while the guide lectured them with facts they didn’t really want to know. She was speaking English. Abby drifted close enough to hear, waiting for someone to jostle her arm or meet her eye.
‘In fact, modern scholars think the arch was originally built by Constantine’s enemy, Maxentius. When Constantine defeated him in the battle, he adapted it for himself.’
The tourists who were bothering to listen looked surprised.
‘Everybody assumes that the Romans built everything from scratch, right?’ the guide said. ‘But no. The marble carvings were taken from other monuments. The big relief panels come from, we think, an arch dedicated originally to Marcus Aurelius. The frieze is from the forum of the Emperor Trajan, also in the second century. The round tondi come from a monument of Hadrian – like the wall, you know? In each case, the faces have been recut or replaced to look like Constantine.’
The tourists peered dutifully at the carvings, the stone men jumbled up in battle and hunts, the stone emperor bareheaded in their midst. They finished taking their photographs and ambled off for their next serving of history. Abby stood there like the last girl at the dance, waiting for someone to swoop down and rescue her. No one turned back; no one came.
She circled the monument to check she hadn’t missed anyone. She checked her phone for messages. She reread the text message for the hundredth time, wondering if she’d missed something.
ARCUM TRIUMPHIS INSIGNEM DICAVIT. Friday 17h. I can help.
She’d got it right. The pixelated words on the screen were identical to the ones chiselled in marble above her, over the central arch. She read the rest of it, comparing it with the translation she’d copied from the British Library.
She checked her watch for the umpteenth time. 5.19.
&
nbsp; He’s not coming, she thought bleakly. The sheer futility of it hit her like a brick. The ruins of the past lowered over her and rebuked her. What had she been thinking, coming here on the basis of an anonymous text message? She reached out and leaned on one of the bollards that protected the arch from motorists. She felt if she didn’t touch something real, she might float free of the world for ever.
More footsteps approached – another tour group, coming around like clockwork. This time the guide was an elderly man, a white moustache and a tweed suit and the regulation umbrella. Again, Abby scanned the following faces – but these were teenagers on a school trip, and she was invisible to them.
‘The Arch of Constantine,’ the guide pronounced. ‘Built in the year 312 as a memorial of Constantine’s victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge. Constantine was a Christian and Maxentius was a pagan. When Constantine won, Europe became Christian.’
The pupils played with their phones and their music players. A few snapped pictures. But Abby was transfixed. A crazy thought had occurred to her.
‘Excuse me,’ she asked. ‘Where is the Milvian Bridge? I mean, does it still exist?’
The guide looked grateful for the interest. ‘The Ponte Milvio. It is here in Rome, at the end of the Via Flaminia, past the Villa Borghese. Popular with lovers,’ he added, for the benefit of the teenagers.
‘Thanks.’
Abby found a taxi opposite the Colosseo metro station. At half-past five on a Friday evening, the Roman traffic was locked tight. It took twenty minutes just to get into the Via Flaminia. She sat on the back seat, gripping the door handle and staring straight ahead. Rain began to bead on the windscreen.
He dedicated this arch as a sign of his victory. The inscription pointed to the arch, but the arch itself was just a symbol, a sign pointing to the battle it commemorated. It was a dim hope, even she could see that – a mad detour on a fool’s errand. But she had to try.
The bridge stood on the northern edge of Rome, just where the Tiber’s concrete embankments took over from nature. She paid off the taxi and advanced on to the bridge. Thick trees crowded the riverbank; ripples gouged the surface of the river where it ran fast over shoals. If you tuned out the apartment blocks and market stalls beyond, you could almost imagine it as it must have been in Constantine’s day, a wild place beyond the city.
